My MRB faced a reinforced blue (US) brigade combat team (BCT) consisting of a mech battalion task force, an armored battalion task force and an air assault battalion. Ouch! They were another 10km north of our FSE, masked by another ridgeline north of the Whale. We wouldn’t see them until they busted over the ridge headed south into our security zone. The FSE wouldn’t have all that much early warning. The question was the air assault troops. The distance was too far for them to come in on the ground unless they moved at night so the question of the day was—where would they insert their troops?

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Australia is on high ground that gradually slopes upward from the Whale Gap. We could see all the way to the northern ridge that masked the blue BCT. As the MRB executive officer (XO), I was placed just below the highest point (to see, yet avoid enemy targeting) in order to see the entire battlefield and call artillery fires for the main body and the FSE. We intended to make them pay for the gap and the 10km dash from the Whale to our main defense. We might just win if we could weaken them during their twenty-kilometer trek south.

The sun came up and the enemy had not yet attacked—no armored recon, no light fighters from the air assault, nothing. This surprised us. We figured the blue forces (BLUFOR) would at least hit the FSE before sunrise. Late in the morning we watched armor build up on the northern ridge; the attack seemed imminent, but there had been no sign of the heliborne troops.

The tanks and brads continued to mass on the ridgeline north, but did not advance. As I waited and watched I noticed a sudden and dramatic build-up of dust behind the ridge. The dust cloud wasn’t a dust trail. This was a sign of helicopters spinning their rotors in preparation of lift off — not armor on the move. So where were they headed in broad daylight?

Soon I saw a few Blackhawk’s pop up above the ridgeline. This was the air assault, but where were they going? I had minutes to assess the enemy course of action. I’m no military genius, but I did have thirty plus rotations under my belt and this pseudo combat experience told me that the enemy was going for a hammer and anvil approach against the FSE. The air assault troops would land behind the FSE as the ‘anvil’ while the BCT would take them on frontally as the ‘hammer’ in order to cause them to fight in two directions while severing their egress route to the main defense.

Sitting on my hilltop to the south I guessed the air assault would land behind the gap. As the sky filled with Blackhawk’s I called for fire south of the gap figuring that the rounds would land about the same time the choppers would. I was right. The Blackhawk’s touched down as the artillery hit and the air assault battalion was annihilated. The hammer had to strike without the anvil and between the FSE and the main defense. We managed to attrite them enough to hold our little cluster of hills. The mission ended in an OPFOR victory.

The plan was obviously flawed since I as a 1LT managed to decipher it. First off, the timing was wrong since I could clearly see the dust build-up from the rotors. Next, the route was wrong since I could see their flight path throughout the insertion. Lastly, the landing zone (LZ) was obvious enough that I could predict it from 20km away. The BCT and air assault battalion planners killed the battalion and doomed the BCT because they did not understand their capabilities, limitations, or operating environment.

To be fair I had beaten air assaults before. We had shot down helo’s attempting to drop down on our heads; separated troops from equipment when they chose LZ’s that were too dispersed and we ambushed Apache Gunship support. We had also lost to air assault troops when they landed outside our range allowing the infantry to disappear in the night only to reappear a few hours later—in our rear. In this case, they over-ran our defenses from behind during limited visibility when we didn’t expect it from where we didn’t expect it. In the desert, air assault wins when they combine rotors with legs to place light fighters in an advantageous position versus dug in armor.

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